Visa VAMP explained: the ratio, the thresholds and what changed in 2025-2026
The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program combines fraud and disputes into one ratio. The thresholds, the April 2026 change and what it means across the payment chain.
Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program, VAMP, replaced separate fraud and dispute monitoring programmes with a single measure. It is aimed at acquirers and merchants, but because it counts fraud that issuers report, it touches everyone in the payment chain.
The VAMP ratio
Since 1 June 2025, the VAMP ratio is the count of fraud reports (TC40) plus disputes (TC15), divided by the count of settled transactions (TC05). It covers card-not-present transactions, domestic and cross-border. Disputes resolved through pre-dispute solutions, and fraud qualified under Compelling Evidence 3.0, are excluded.
The thresholds
- Acquirer portfolio: Above Standard from a ratio of 0.5%, Excessive from 0.7%, with minimum monthly volumes of fraud and disputes.
- Excessive merchant: from 2.2% in Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe and the US, and from 1.5% in Latin America, again with minimum volumes.
- From 1 April 2026, the Excessive merchant threshold in Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe and the US dropped to 1.5%.
Enumeration counts too
VAMP also measures enumeration: bursts of authorisation attempts used to guess or test card details. An enumeration ratio of 20% or more of authorisations, or 300,000 or more enumerated transactions in a month, puts a merchant in scope.
What it means for issuers
Issuers aren't the target of VAMP, but they are the source of its fraud data. Every fraud report an issuer files feeds the ratio. Stopping fraud before it settles, rather than reporting it afterwards, reduces disputes for everyone downstream and protects the cardholder from the hassle in the first place.
That is the logic of deciding in the authorisation: the cheapest dispute is the one that never needs to be raised.